"They've doubled my screw and given me an interest in the business."
"How?"
He shook his head, yawning. "A permanent agreement ...percentages ...I'm too woolly-headed to tell you now."
"But what does it mean? You don't care about money or position as a rule. You've always told me that your work was enough for you. Why are you so pleased?" Though the moment before she had thought she cared nothing for the ways that his soul travelled, she was in an agony lest he had been changed by the love of woman and had become buyable.
He read her perfectly, and pulled himself out of his drowsiness to reassure her. "No, I'm not being glad because I'm pleasing them; I'm glad because now I can make them please me. It's what I've always been working for, and it's come two years before I expected it. I've got my footing in the biggest armament firm in England. I'm the youngest director. I've got"—again he made that stiff, sweeping gesture of arrogance that was not vanity—"the best brain of them all. In ten years I shall be someone in the firm. In twenty years I shall be nearly everybody. And think of what sport industry's going to be during the next half-century while this business of capital and labour is being fought out, particularly to a man like me, who's got no axe to grind, who's outside all interests, who, thanks to you, doesn't belong to any class. And you see I needn't be afraid of losing my power to work if I meddle in affairs. I'm definitely, finally, unalterably a scientific man. I've got that for good. That's thanks to you too."
"How could your stupid old mother do that?" she murmured protestingly.
"You're not stupid," he said, and bending down he kissed her head where it lay on his shoulder. "Whatever good there is in me I've got from you. You gave me my brain. And I'm able to do scientific work because of the example you've been to me, though I'm rottenly unfit for it myself. Mother, look at my hands. Do you see how they're shaking? They're steady enough when I'm doing anything, but often when there's nothing to be done they shake and shake. My mind's like that. When there's someone to impress or govern I'm all right. But when I'm alone it shakes—there's a kind of doubt. And there's such a lot of loneliness in scientific work, when even science isn't there. Then that comes.... Doubt. Not of what one's doing, but of what one is; or where one is. I never would have kept on with it if it hadn't been for your example. I couldn't have pushed on. I would have gone off and done adventurous things.
"Do you remember that French chap who wanted me to go with him into British Guiana? I'd have liked that. There's nothing stops one thinking so well as being a blooming hero; and it's such fun. And why should one go on doing this lonely work that's so hellishly hard? Of course it's important. Mother, Science is the most wonderful thing in the world. It's a funny thing that if you think and talk about the spirit you only look into the mind of man, but if you cut out the spirit and study matter you look straight into the mind of God. But what good is that when you know that at the end you're going to die and rot and there's not the slightest guarantee which would satisfy anybody but a born fool that God had any need of us afterwards? You can't even console yourself with the thought that it's for the good of the race, because that will die and rot too when the earth grows cold. One has to stake everything on the flat improbability that service of the truth is a good in itself, such a good that it's worth while sacrificing one's life to it.
"That's where you've been such a help to me. You had no justification for supposing that life was worth living. You'd every reason to suppose that the whole business was foul, and the only sensible thing to do was to get all the fun one could out of it. If you had determined to be as little a mother to me as you could I would have understood it, considering of what I must have reminded you. You'd money, you were beautiful, you've always been able to attract people. You might so easily have gone away from here and made a life of your own and just kept me in the corner of your eye, as lots of unhappily married women that one meets keep their children. Instead you shut yourself up here and gave yourself utterly to looking after me. I sometimes feel that the reason I've grown up taller and less liable to illness than other men is that you loved me so much when I was a child. You seemed to pour your life into me. And you didn't just take pleasure in me. You trained me, and I must have been a nasty little brute to train. Do you remember licking me because I went to that circus? You took it out of yourself teaching me to be straight and decent. If you'd been an ordinary married woman who believed that you'd go to hell if you didn't do your duty by your children, and who knew she'd get public respect and the devotion of her husband as a reward for doing it, the way you did it would have been magnificent. But to do it like that when you knew that there was no such thing as justice in heaven or earth—I tell you, mother, it's kept me going to think of the sacrifice you made for me—"
"Oh no," she cried. "It wasn't a sacrifice at all, my dear, to be with you."